City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [104]
Smiling to himself, he nodded his understanding. Soon he was standing by the door with the other two, ready for combat. Randur opened it and the white-skins immediately, simultaneously, turned to face him. Some of them had dark stains around their mouths where they had gorged themselves on raw horse flesh. Their heads tilted and twitched unnervingly.
‘Now what?’ Eir whispered. ‘It’s so hard to see them in this light.’
‘The young lady has a point,’ Munio said. ‘You didn’t think that through, did you? Rushing into combat, as always . . .’
‘Shut up.’ He’s just as bad as Denlin was . . .
The figures came closer, then fanned out, weapons ready, forming a rough semicircle around the door of the hunting lodge. As they loomed nearer Randur could see them more clearly. They possessed absolutely no pigmentation, and their prominent veins were a clear network visible beneath the pallid surface. Their eyes possessed some disturbing quality that made them actually glow blue. They were humanoid, and frighteningly so in some ways – their movements and their mannerisms and their interactions. A figure in the centre with long colourless hair tried addressing them in a guttural and esoteric language. It sounded like the casting of a spell.
‘That horse was ours!’ Randur shouted, not quite sure what else to say. He pointed his hand to indicate the remains of the horse.
Tips of trees rattled in the wind. He held out his sword and aimed it at the spokesman. ‘Leave us. Just go.’
The figure, now clearly a woman, took several phenomenally slow but light steps forward as if the terrain provided an awkward surface to move on. When she was only an armspan away from Randur, she spoke to him directly, although again he couldn’t comprehend any of the arcane sounds uttered. Those blue eyes seemed as if powered by relics. Red trickles streaked her chin and neck like she was salivating the dead horse’s blood. Her stare totally captivated him, whether because she was so utterly alien to him, or because there was some deep mental power keeping him transfixed, he couldn’t tell.
Randur wrenched his gaze towards Eir, then back again. He did not know what to do next. There was a deep tension filling the air, as if millennia of time had been breached.
‘Who are you?’ he breathed.
The white woman raised her axe and suddenly Randur found himself on the defensive, whipping his blade through her extended wrist. A scream worse than that of any banshee ripped apart the evening air and stilled the weather. The others began to crowd in with their weapons.
As they surged on the three defenders, Randur waded into the melee. His opponents were not strong, almost flouncing away before him, but somehow these creatures always managed to block out his line of attack and push his sword away.
A pause in the combat, a sudden gasp.
Randur turned to see Rika emerging from the doorway with a crude torch in one hand, a vision that imposed itself upon his awareness like the appearance of some holy apparition.
At the sight of the flames, the figures scattered manically, though dragging with them the horse’s corpse.
Randur looked round to Munio, and then to Rika, and . . . Where was Eir?
A muffled scream from the edge of the forest.
‘Fuck, they’ve got her. Rika, make yourself useful and bring along that torch.’
*
Clustered together, they sprinted along a path parallel to the limestone cliff, with the forest to their right. The snow-covered terrain was utterly aphotic, their vision restricted to several paces in front under the light of the torch. There were faint tracks that the white beings had left behind them, punctuated frequently with drops of blood which Randur hoped originated from the hunks of horse flesh.
Eventually they caught up with a figure lying face-down in the snow. It wasn’t Eir, Randur saw with a stab of relief. This was the spokeswoman whose hand he had severed. Lingering over her corpse, they realized she must have bled to death there in the darkness.
They moved on, the tracks accumulating, indicating